OPODELDOC.

I’m finally reading Gogol’s Dead Souls in Russian, and a few pages into Chapter Four I encountered the following line (addressed by the cheerful scoundrel Nozdryov to the protagonist, Chichikov, who has just refused to join him because of pressing business):
— Ну вот уж и дело! уж и выдумал! Ах ты, Оподелдок Иванович!
Like much of Gogol’s dialogue, this is more or less untranslatable, but the first two exclamations can be prosaically rendered “‘Business’! You just made that up!” The last one, however, baffled me; word for word, it means “Oh you, Opodeldok Ivanovich!” Opodeldok was clearly not an actual Russian name, so I looked it up in my trusty Oxford dictionary (where it is listed under the more usual spelling оподельдок), and there it was—helpfully defined as “opodeldoc.” I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED. There I found:

It’s easy to see why this remarkable word caught on; its magniloquent pseudo-onomatopoeia was catnip to the linguistic sense of nineteenth-century America, with its love of sonorous rodomontade, and it seems to have been preserved in regional dialects until fairly recently (and perhaps survives to this day—anybody know?). At any rate, I’m glad to have discovered it, and I hope you will be too. If only I knew what the hell Gogol meant by “Opodeldok Ivanovich,” my joy would be complete.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go rub some opodeldoc on my aching shoulder.

Comments

the old fashioned
grandmother who used
to wear steel rimmed
glasses and make
everybody take opodeldoc
has now got a new
set of ox glands and
is dancing the black bottom
Excellent! And that page has all manner of wonderful things, like:prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into
Don Marquis is always a good read. Thanks!

From your own reference on the right (Dal’)
Have you ever smell camphor oil? If you did, you’d never forget. I’d loosely – and very subjectively – interpret thus addressing as to somebody annoying, irritating, an unpleasant surprise – opodel’dok, in other words.
And now we interrupt our proggramme, wish you the best new year ever, and return to the spectacular table and Italian sparkling wine (I know, but it was my son’s present)
Happy NY, everyone!

Lucky you — I didn’t even get sparkling wine! (I think it’s the first time in my adult life I’ve seen in the new year without any bubbly — but I did have a nice cabernet sauvignon with the beef Stroganov, so I can’t complain.) Happy New Year to you too!

In the very first page of Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk (at least in the Finnish translation) it is told that Svejk applied Opodeldok ointment to his knees when his landlady Mrs Müller came to tell him the news that Ferdinand has been killed.

I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED.
Use Lingvo much? I use it for quick checks of words when I’m translating, and I become enraged every time I happen to paste in a perfective verb and the only thing listed in the entry is “pfv. of [imperfective form of the verb]“.
As for New Years, I had champagne with a scoop of lime sherbet, which was a new one for me.

Have you considered asking a native Russian speaker?
Not being one, I looked in my Academy Tol’kovj Slovar’ and found not the word. Nor is it in the recent Kuznetsov, which goes from opoganit’sja to opodlet’ which means “stat’ podlim ili poldee.”
Consider it a Russian malapropism. The character is misuing the word, using hifalutin speach.
Or a pun.

A number of native speakers read LH, including Tatyana, who guessed (above) that it referred to “somebody annoying, irritating, an unpleasant surprise.” That’s probably as close as we’re going to come. As for dictionaries, the word is too out of date for the ones you’re looking in; you need Dahl for this kind of thing.

See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opodeldok
How about ‘Old Man Ivanovich’.
It was a cure/relief for rheumatism.
Still in contemporary usage, sort of. See ‘Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod’. Chapter on ‘Stop Making Sense’. Probably also available on the Zwiebelfisch web page.

Opodeldok is mentioned in the Czech original of Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk (Osudy dobreho vojaka Svejka) as well. The name of the medicine is very well-known in the Czech republic (I’m Czech), not that is used in today’s medical praxis;), but almost every Czech knows this passage (among other famous ones) from Sve
For me opodeldoc is a stinking substance of questionable character and effect.

A bit off-topic but I was struggling today with another supposed personal name, Hortensia (a Russian as well as archaic English name for Hydrangea). It sure sent me on a botanico-etymologico-genealogical wild goose chase. Hortensia is often said to be named after a sister of Prince Charles Henry of Nassau-Siegen, a Russian naval commander and an explorer of the South Seas. The problem is that this Karl Heinrich von Nassau seems to have been an only child (and not really a prince either). And doesn’t it just mean smth. like ‘a gardeness’ in Latin? Strange name of a nonexistent princess…

Hortensius is a Roman family name, and there are three saints who bore it (one a martyr in Alexandria, feast day May 19). Hortensia would just be the feminine form of the name, rather than specifically meaning ‘female gardener’. In France and England the distinction between the two names would have been lost.

It is in modern times. My point was that Hortensia and Hortensius would both become Hortense in French, just as Claudius and Claudia both became Claude. However, if a name was not a saint’s name, it usually wasn’t preserved. Since both St. Claudes were male (Claude of Besançon and Claude de la Colombière), as were the three non-French St. Claudiuses, the female name has become fairly rare in Francophonia. Just why the reverse is true of Hortense I don’t know.

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